nWire

Dec 05, 2008

It has been a very busy time for me. My product web site went on the air about 4 weeks ago. The initial responses were overwhelming. It was beyond what I'd hope for. I managed to create a nice base of beta users working with nWire. The main thing missing from my site was the option to actually buy nWire.

The passing week was a race against the clock to get my payment options worked out. I decided to go for PayPal and had to integrate with their system. I finally got everything up and running and the payment options went online on Wednesday evening.

On Thursday morning, I got my first paying customer. That is a call for celebration. It's knowing that you are not the only crazy person who believes in your idea. It's seeing your creation comes to life. Money is a very strong feedback that says: yes, there's value here for me.

The busy times left my blog silent, but I intend to pick it up. I have tons of topics to write about: the new tools I've been using in the past 3 months (Screenflow, TextMate and others), the integration with PayPal, setting up my site and more.

I'm also planning to start using Twitter. You can say I was opposing Twitter for a long time and I'm finally coming around. So, you want to know what I ate for lunch? Probably not. But you'd be happy to know that I ironed out an annoying bug on my site which caused my database connections to drop. I'll let you know when I'll be there.

Nov 03, 2008

The time has come to raise the curtain on the project I've been working on for the past year (or so). Drumroll please... welcome to nWire. nWire is the name of my product. The company is called nWire Software. To learn more, please visit my site at: www.nwiresoftware.com.

nWire is an of Eclipse plug-ins which expedites Java development by assisting the developer in navigating through the code and understanding it. The initial version of nWire consists of 3 main tools:

The navigator: presents all the system components and associations in a dynamic column view.

Navigator search: incremental search for every component in the system.

The visualizer: presents the components and associations graphically.

By component I refer to classes, interfaces, methods, etc., while Associations may be extension of classes, implementation of interfaces, method invocation, field access, etc. There are a number of features in nWire, which are more than what you get from Eclipse today, like search as you type for methods and fields. The navigator presents information which can be found in various tools today, but the big difference is that it gathers all the information into one single view which is, in my opinion, very easy to use.

I have a screencast which explains these main features, so be sure to check it out (in the main page click on watch). You can also check out the screenshots which explain what it means.

I have big plans for nWire. I believe it provides great value today. More value will come from aggregating information from various frameworks and languages into a single tool. Soon there will be support for Spring Framework and other frameworks and languages will follow. Later down the road, you'll be able to add your own self-tailored frameworks as well. You can read more about the concept and road-map here.

nWire is currently in private beta. Today I installed it in the first customer beta-site. The first site is about 10 minutes drive from my office, which allows me to provide close support and get better feedback. I will be sending out beta invitations in 2 weeks, so be sure to register if you'd like to participate.

From now, I'll be blogging on the nWire blog as well and I invite you to register to the feed for updates.

Don't forget to send me any feedback you may have (either by mail, or using my feedback form). Let me know what you think about the site, about the new product and register to participate in my beta.